Saturday, 10 May 2014

Introduction to cURL

cURL is a computer software project providing a library and command-line tool for transferring data using various protocols. The cURL project produces two products, libcurl and cURL. It was first released in 1997.

In this post we will see how do we install this tool and use it to perform some common HTTP requests like GET.

This will directly take you to download link which on click will give you popup to download the zip file.

Extract the zip to get the executable.(I have put the executable in C:\Curl)

Add this folder in your
environment variables and you are done.

You can then execute curl
command from cmd.

PS : I had some problems with proxy. Though I don't have one cURL seems to pick it from somewhere. I was using that proxy about a year ago and have not used since. Not sure where cURL picks this confog from. But as a workaround I have usecurl --noproxy * websiteURL

This will essentially disable proxy. But you may not have to do so.

For more reading on various practical usages of curl command you may refer to